Homemade Biryani Masala

I love making homemade masalas (of course not always) and as they say homemade is definitely the BEST! Fresh, aromatic and so full of Indian-ness! Make it and use it and you’ll have a new flavor in life and in your food. Even if you regularly use the store-bought version, you will mark the noticeable difference in flavor with this fresh homemade masala. The best part is that it is so easy to make that you’ll wonder why you have not been doing it for all these years. Mom always used to grind fresh masalas on her sil-patti (stone-block). Over time, the stone block was replaced by the more convenient electric mixer/grinder, the masala and the lip-smacking taste remained unchanged. The biryani masala is one such example which is one of my favorites. In fact I never quite like the store bought one as I always feel something off about them. So here is another one of my most favorite ones and stay tuned for more.

Here's a little tip- I always try to make small quantities as and when needed. Fresh-made, that's when the masala blends are the most fragrant. For grinding small quantities, I always use my coffee grinder.

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Kheer/Indian rice pudding with saffron and nuts

If there is any sweet dish deeply rooted into the Indian culture it is most ubiquitously the 'Kheer'. For those who have not had the pleasure, it is a close cousin to your typical rice pudding just more exotic and flavorful (in my humble opinion). Here are a few facts to highlight the pervasiveness and importance of this dish in Indian culture. Even though the taste might vary when prepared by one person to another due to how much attention has been given to details, unlike most other dishes in the Indian cuisine that vary widely with the region they are being made in, the recipe and ingredients for the Kheer have stood the test of time and geography. Barring of course the additional flavoring or condiments, the taste essentially is unchanged. Here's another fact - traditionally, when a newly wed bride comes home the first time to her in-laws place, guess what is the first dish she is expected to make, yes the Kheer. Any celebration, any traditional function and festival, even for day to day entertaining the kheer finds its way into the menu. The greatness of this recipe is its simplicity. The slow cooking of the milk along with rice creates that delicious thick rich earthy flavor. Guess you have to try it to find out if you haven't already.

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Rasam Vada/Crisp lentil dumplings in a spiced tomato soup

This has been in my drafts folder forever. Not sure why it never made it out the door, well at least not until now. Guess I was waiting for the right moment. Talking about the right moment, these crispy dumplings soaked in the spicy soup is just perfect while you wait in the comfort of your home for that first snow, not that it ever snows here in south Florida. This dish hails from southern India but has come to be popular in all parts of the country of course with the details varying on how its done every couple hundred miles. Here I present how I like to do them. Hubs is a big fan of this and when I pulled out this recipe from my drafts, I did get to hear a mouthful on how I haven't made these for him in a while. When you take a spoonful into your mouth, while you enjoy the crispiness from the dumplings, the spicy soup kicks in and makes it just a delightful mix of flavors on your palate. The recipe is not too tricky either. It uses simple ingredients including the Rasam powder that are easily available in any Indian grocery store. And yes, if you cannot get the  donut shape right, it is perfectly okay to just shape the dumplings as regular dough balls.

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Meetha Gulkand Paan/ Betel leaf mouth freshener with rose petal jam

 

Dear friends- The holiday season is around the corner and the holiday fever is catching up in my household as well. Just wanted to let you know that I will be taking a little time off during the holiday (a well deserved one as hubs tells me :). Will surely see you in a little bit.

Happy Holidays

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hewing the Betel leaf or Paan, as it is called in Hindi, loaded with fragrant and flavorful fruit, herb and spice mixes, is the ubiquitous mouth freshener in the Indian sub-continent. If you think chewing gum is the most common form of freshening up your mouth, think again. Now I am no historian but the tradition of chewing the leaf has existed in the culture since the beginning of recorded history and is very much prevalent still in the modern age. To give you an idea, I do not think there is any public street in India where within five minutes you could not walk up to a little stall right on the side of the street selling this delight. This post would be incomplete without giving you a little description of that ever-present 'paan-dukaan'. A little makeshift stall made of plywood, roofing sheets and any other material nailed together to make a box like structure and propped up on four wooden legs, sometimes as small as five by five feet with a person barely managing to sit inside with a small counter in front of him. You walk up and ask him or her for the kind of flavoring you want and lo and behold within a matter of seconds he is ready with your instant gratification. In some places you pay as little as five rupees (a dime, no kidding) for a serving and walk away.

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Mirchi Ka Salan/Green Chillies in Spicy Tangy Sesame Peanut Sauce

 
es you read it right. A curry of green chillies! If you take my word for it, this curry is utterly lip-smacking and delicious besides of course being... yes... hot! Mirchi, in hindi, means chillies/peppers and salan is hyderabadi lingo for a creamy curry or sauce. This curry is not just something I made up on a day I was overzealous. It in-fact is a very popular curry from the hyderbadi cuisine. So much so that this curry was popular as a favorite of the royalty of the yesteryears.
Hyderabadi cuisine, the cuisine from a region in the south-eastern part of India is highly inspired by the Mughlai cuisine. The word "Nawabi" is as synonymous with the Hyderabadi cuisine as "Shahi" is with Lucknowi. Hyderabadi recipes are famous for their rich taste and unique use of ingredients, roasted spices and aromatic flavors. This  dish has all these components and more... chillies simmered in roasted peanuts, sesame, coconut sauce with lots of indigenous spices cooked to perfection give this curry its unique spicy, sweet and tangy taste. It is very easy to put together and has a very rich creamy taste that will compel you to make it over and over again.It is nutty with peanuts, has a distinct taste of sesame seeds and the  bite and heat from the chillies... ahh.

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Chandrakala/Stuffed Sweet Festive Pastries

ere is another recipe from me that gives me an intense sense of nostalgia.

The start of 'navaratra' marks the beginning of the festive season in India. Navaratra culminates in Dussehera after which comes the much awaited Diwali with Dhanteras and Chhath between and immediately after. These followed by Christmas and of course the welcome of the new year. Festivities in India are associated with pomp and fervor, family, dressing in your finest, prayers and worship, time off from school, carnivals, guests and of course food, lots of food. How is that for nostalgia!

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Paneer Jalfrezi/Cottage cheese in spicy tangy sauce with bell peppers and onion

uite unlike the super-star butter paneer masala which is practically synonymous with Indian cuisine, the jalfrezi is mellow but very much like any Indian curry. It has a burst of flavors, is full of aromatic spices with an exotic taste that is bound to take you by surprise. Cubes of succulent home made cheese are simmered in a fragrant garlic tomato sauce with loads of colorful peppers and freshly ground spices that will make you mop your plate clean and ask for more. Unlike a few other paneer dishes this one is not very rich or laden with butter and cream to make it tasty.

A common dhaba dish all over India ~ dhaba is a Indian equivalent to the American road-side diner. Known for its rustic, simple, basic, inexpensive yet flavorful original dishes and very popular among long distance roadies and truck drivers. Whenever I go to India I make it a point  to take a drive with hubs and kiddo to the nearest dhaba on the national highway just to have some of their dal makhani, kadahi paneer and fresh out of the tandoor (clay oven) those buttery flaky tandoori rotis ~ ahh.

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Chhena Payesh - USMasala hits 200 !

ES!!! I am writing my 200th post!!! At the risk of sounding cheesy I can not help but say - I cannot believe it. It almost feels like I started only a couple of days ago and only yesterday I was congratulating myself for my 50th. What amazes me even more is that I have been blogging only for just about ten short months. Do your math, with about 20 posts a month, I believe I can safely conclude about myself 'I love to cook'.
Over and above all, I am totally and completely amazed at the response USMasala gets from my readers. You make me feel all warm and fuzzy with all your encouragement, so a big Thank You to you all. My stats tell me how immensely loved my site is. It is very humbling and makes me more passionate about what I love doing. It has been out and out an joy-ride. It is such a great feeling to touch someone's life in anyway - help in a certain way - someone somewhere in some part of the world, an unknown stranger who suddenly becomes a very familiar name and face.
I'm not kidding when I say that food blogging has changed my life in ways I never imagined. The most important thing is it has taught me is that you follow your passion and the everything else will follows. Another big thing is to admire the simplest things in life- a food-photo that comes out well, an experiment that succeeds, a thoughtful comment left on a post. The creativity, thinking, writing, history, everything.

Hubby deserves a special mention. Between tasting my dishes, taking awesome pictures and being my 24 x 7 technical support, he is the one who keeps the show going :) Thanking him would actually diminish the value that he adds to my efforts.

To all my readers - Thank you for being a part of my life and letting me and USMasala be a tiny part of your lives. Love you all!

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Ghee - from homemade Butter

larified butter or ghee is used extensively in India and other South Asian cuisines. Also, practically any Hindu religious ritual is incomplete without the use of ghee. It has a lovely rich and nutty flavor, and enhances the flavor and taste of anything that it is added to. Ghee, as the English version of its name 'clarified-butter' suggests, is prepared from butter. How is butter made? Well, from cream; and cream is made from milk. In this post, I pick it up from store-bought cream and make my own butter and then turn it magically into ghee! You can choose to pick up directly from butter or if you are a little more adventurous than me (like my mom is), then you might as well pick up from milk and gather your own cream. Back in India my mom always prepares Ghee from scratch. She used to collect the cream daily off the milk brought by the doodhwallahs/door-to-door milk vendors, until the container with cream was full and ready to be made into Ghee.

The process behind it is quite magical (scientific for those who understand how these things work chemically). As you churn it with a whisk, cream which otherwise is a runny liquid, changes to a frothy texture. This happens rather quickly, what we popularly know as whipped cream. Now if you be patient and keep at it, after enough whisking, the buttermilk separates from the cream and behold you have butter!

Unsalted butter is slowly brought to a boil upon which the milk solids separate from the clarified butter.

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Paneer Pav Bhaji with homemade Pav Buns

umbai is famous around the world as the center of Indian cinema "Bollywood", what some do not know that it is also famous for its array of mouth watering street foods especially the chaats available at every street corner. Juhu beach, especially is the most famous hub - a very crowded place where you often find yourself wading through a sea of people with the sound of the waves crashing in the background often looking for the next yummy food stall that gets your attention among the numerous street food vendors lined up. No trip to this beach is complete without having those delectable chaats they serve there and possibly a healthy dose of pani poories, vada pav, batata, bhel. Watching the vendors mix up the ingredients and cook up your snack to order with sheer abandon - without a care in the world, while keeping a keen eye for anyone who needs that extra little chutney, is a pleasure by itself. These street foods have crossed boundries of the city (and even the country) and are found practically everywhere there is Indian food sold.
Pav Bhaji is another such road-side delicacy. It is a very easy and a kind of street food that is a wholesome meal in itself and relatively healthier (if you minus all the amul butter of course). It is basically kind of a stew a mix of different vegetables in a spicy tomato gravy with loads of butter and eaten with butter soaked pav bread which is used scoop up the bhaji--yum :) This is even served at fancy restaurants and even top chefs boast of having this in their repertoire. A great one pot meal especially with the overload of vegetables in it. Fussy eaters like it and eat up all the veggies mixed in the yummy bhaji.
Usually paneer is not used as an ingredient in the bhaji. I decided to try it out with it. After-all if you saw my Paneer Tawa Masala, when you can mix pav bhaji masala in paneer, why not mix paneer in pav bhaji - makes sense, right? It did to me and it made an already awesome dish abso'freaking'lutely fanstastic. If it was any proof for me, hubby said this is how pav bhaji was gonna be made in this household henceforth, with paneer!

Here's the recipe for my homemade Pav buns.The traditional pav bread as it is called ladi pav in India is a yeasty crusty bread with a soft texture inside. You can use the store bought dinner rolls but I prefer this homemade one.

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Mango-Saffron Kulfi for the Men in Blue

s I write this and get ready to publish, I cannot but help mentioning the victory of the Indian cricket team in the Cricket World Cup. Hip Hip Hooray! Three cheers for the Men in Blue. It feels great to be on top of the world and in such style. Go India! So this post is dedicated to the victory.
As the mercury climbs and the sun becomes more relentless, it is beginning to remind me of summers in India. The carefree school days, long summer holidays, visiting grandpa's place- I am sure each one of us must have some fond memories of summer like these. Summer also reminds us of our favorite food ice-cream :).The popular variation of which in India is called Kulfi. I have some fond memories of those summer evenings. I remember whenever we used to go out to eat chaat and panipuri (which was very often) we had to have kulfi otherwise the whole outing used to be incomplete. 

Kulfi is an Indian version of ice-cream... often flavored with cardamom, saffron and nuts and has a very unique flavor. It has similarities with ice-cream in terms of texture, taste and of course the fact that it is frozen milk! But unlike western ice creams, kulfi is not whipped, resulting in a solid, dense frozen dessert. Where I come from, it is often served with falooda noodles (kind of like vermicelli). During the summers in india, there is no dessert more popular than kulfi.

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Gujiya - Holi hai!

ujiya is a traditional indian sweet dish made typically during the festival of Holi. The sweet delicious filling inside the crunchy flaky pastry covering tastes out of this world and makes you want to grab some again and again. Gujias slightly vary from region to region. In the Northern parts of India, the filling is made with sweetened khoya and dry fruits and nuts while in South Western States, it consists of shredded coconut, nuts and jaggery or sugar. I of course like this the way my mom makes them.

Where I come from, we call it Pedukiya. These are made in most households during the festivities of Holi like it was in ours. They always take me back in time to those days when on the morning of the festival, you would wake up and go out on the streets armed with all your paints, colors and gulal. Any person you find young or old, whether you know them or not, you make sure you get them painted beyond recognition. Of course you get the brunt of it too so much so you would not recognize if you saw yourself in the mirror... lol. While you did all that, you would sneak an occasional peak in the house and pick a taste of all the goodies mom was busy cooking up. I remember how my mother and aunts used to make it and how all of us children would huddle up in the kitchen and be curious and all excited, waiting for the treat. The sweet aroma of festivity, sounds of laughter, the deep frying, chit-chat, gossip... I miss them all... here in my kitchen when alone I cook something like this there is not someone always to taste as it comes hot off the frying pan, the chit-chat... but the aroma of cooking the warmth of festivity makes me feel at home again. I have the sweetest and the most caring man in the whole world who is my sous chef my taster my food critic, my everything. With him and my our little bundle of joy everyday feels like a festival and keep me going!

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Methi Thepla/Fenugreek Flatbread

ubby has officially declared me the "Methi crazy gal". I secretly do a happy dance when I see fresh methi ( fenugreek) bunch in the Indian grocery store, grow them in my backyard when they stop selling them in the stores and with all this always make sure I have the biggest stock of kasoori methi in case I run out of both options... lol :)) Lately I have been getitng lucky with the fresh methi. My local Indian grocery seems to carry it everytime I visit, and everytime I get two big bunches. As you can imagine, I've been cooking and eating a lot of methi based dishes lately.

Last sunday for dinner I was not in the mood to cook something elaborate and thought of making some methi thepla. It is a well known Gujarati bread which is thankfully a full meal in itself :) and of course my family favorite.

Fenugreek/Methi is very common in Indian cooking. The leaves are used as herbs, the fresh leaves are cooked like methi dal and aloo methi curry, parathas are made of these and even ladoos of methi seeds. The dried leaves which are popularly known as Kasoori methi are often used to flavor a lot of dishes, mainly creamy paneer and non-vegetarian gravies. The seeds are used as a spice.

The popularity of the fenugreek is not just for the numerous medicinal properties it has to offer. The seeds and the leaves are subtly bitter but offers a very strong unique and distinctive flavor to any recipe they are added to. 

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Coconut rice

If you saw my Yogurt Vadai post from a couple of weeks ago, you will know about the my cool new possession, my new cookbook 'Dakshin'. From the different recipes that I had bookmarked and in keeping with my promise, here's another one of my favorite ones from the book.
I'd heard about this rice a lot. At first it didn't seem like a big deal, after all it was rice mixed with shredded coconut. However, I wanted to make it the authentic way so I followed the recipe and let me tell you, when done right, it is far more than just coconut mixed with rice. Also, it is a perfect way to use the leftover rice with a very quick yet elegant makeover.

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Daal- baati

This is one of my mom's most amazing dishes and is the most sought after by family and friends alike. She has made this dish for as long as I can remember. She has even gotten compliments from some guests who were even the natives of that state to which this dish belongs.
Daal baati is a very popular dish from the state of Rajasthan, a wholesome power packed delicious meal. Dal, or lentil curry, is made of several kind of lentils which are cooked along with the masalas to make a tasty dal or curry. Baati, a rounded ball of dough that's baked in a charcoal fire or oven. Baati is made out of wheat, gram flour, millet or a mix of maize flour served dunked in the delicious daal with loads of ghee, tastes heavenly mouthwatering!
Mom did tweak the original recipe a little. The original recipe does not have veggies in the daal and the baati is made with plain flour. The addition of veggies, I believe, makes an already great daal even better. Addition of spices in the baati flour makes it even tastier. Mom used to make it on a gas grill. My touch to this is just to make it in a regular oven. It is not as high on the list of favorites on hubby's list so I do not come around to make this dish very often. Guess I could not wait any more :)
I got a few recipes from my mom written down in a notebook that I brought with me to the US after I got married. It is hands-down the best cookbook among tons of others that I own. I had this one bookmarked in the notebook for a real long time and only finally got around to it. From hubby's reaction it appears it climbed up a few steps in his charts :)
Don't be deterred by the long list of ingredients. You find most in a typical indian spice rack. Once you have them together, the method is really simple.
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